Ten 2011 Albums for Christians Who Hate Christian Music 24 comments

By Andy Whitman

I can’t stand Christian music. But I’m a Christian whose favorite music often addresses the deep and abiding big questions, and that doesn’t conform to easily labeled genres. Some of this music was made by Christians. Some of it was made by atheists. A lot of it was made by people whose religious/spiritual views are utterly unknown to me. All of it was released in 2011, and resonates in deep ways for me.

The “loss/cross” and “grace/face” praise-by-numbers contingent might want to skip the proceedings without further ado. This is for people who have faith, and questions and doubts, and who are willing to abide in the mystery.

Aradhna – Namaste Sate

Aradhna are missionary kids raised in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, and whose music is deeply indebted to the musical heritage of those countries. Namaste Sate is a study in contrasts, featuring sitars and synthesizers, Hindi and English lyrics, ancient texts and modern beats, and soothing, contemplative whispers and soaring, post-rock crescendos. While Aradhna’s musical approach remains as searching and eclectic as ever, the new album features a more rock-oriented approach than 2007’s Amrit Vani. “Yapudhe” sounds like what might have happened if U2 had been raised in New Delhi instead of Dublin, and the title track employs the trademarked slow build of post-rock giants such as Sigur Ros and Mogwai.

Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

Julianna Barwick inhabits an unusual musical terrain midway between the New Age cooing of Enya and the dissonant choral works of Gyorgy Ligeti, whose striking compositions were used so effectively in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. On The Magic Place, Barwick sculpts cathedrals of sound out of her own voice; great, cavernous, multi-tracked chorales that soothe and jar. These wordless songs speak to me of loveliness and brokenness, beauty and terror.

David Bazan – Strange Negotiations

Bazan, formerly of Christian indie stalwarts Pedro the Lion, has always written thoughtful, engaging songs about faith and doubt. Now he does so from the standpoint of a former Christian and atheist. Strange Negotiations takes up the argument suspended on 2009’s Curse Your Branches. Strident and embittered, rejected by the evangelical culture and plagued by his own insecurities, Bazan doesn’t have answers, but he has plenty of accusatory questions. He rejects God, and he can’t stop writing and singing about God. If that sounds conflicted, it is, and Strange Negotiations provides a fascinating glimpse into an unresolved, ongoing dark night of the soul.

Josh Garrels – Love & War & The Sea In Between

If St. Francis of Assisi was a hip-hop/soul musician, he would be Josh Garrels. Shunning record labels and uninterested in the trappings of celebrity, Garrels simply releases his music on his own terms. He remains the best musical celebrant of the natural world, reveling in the beauty he finds. Mixing lovely acoustic folk music with strident beats and a rapper’s gift of rhythm and rhyme, Garrels continues to be an outspoken, poetic prophet of anti-consumerism, decrying our disposable culture and calling for renewed commitment to living out the implications of the gospel. This is his best album yet. Fittingly, he released it for free on his website.

Joe Henry – Reverie

Another year, another superb Joe Henry album. This one–part lounge music, part blues, and all poetry–was recorded live in the studio, with occasional muffs intact, but also with the fire of improvisational interplay very much in evidence. Like the best poets, Henry’s imagery is both unequivocally explicit and sublimely grand, attuned to big themes even as he limns the interchangeable days of ordinary people. He captures tiny, specific moments with a master painter’s precision–an old Henry Fonda film projected against the side of a bank, the back door of a hotel propped open by a kitchen worker’s foot–but those moments serve as gateways to something deeper and richer; seemingly insignificant gestures and memories transformed into epiphanies of self-awareness and compassion toward the wider world. He’s been at it now for twenty five years. This might be his finest effort.

Bill Mallonee – The Power & the Glory

Bill Mallonee is a screw-up. He’ll tell you so, and he’s now made 40 albums about it, both as a solo artist and with his former band Vigilantes of Love. He’s a poetic screw-up though, a master of a thousand-and-one metaphors depicting the depravity of man, and every so often he lets in little glimmers of hope and the promise of positive change. He does it again on The Power & the Glory, his strongest album in years, rocking those metaphors with Neil Young guitar licks and a Dylanesque howl.

Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender

Celebrating twenty years of music making and a longstanding marriage, Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist decamped to Joe Henry’s South Pasadena recording studio and made their loosest, most intimate album. The Long Surrender is both a celebration of hard-won victories and an acknowledgment of the ongoing struggle, spiritually and relationally, to persevere in the face of uncertainty. Detweiler’s lyrics are wise, confessional, and poetic, and Bergquist imbues them with sultriness and soul. These are torch songs for lovers who are in it for the long haul.

Josh T. Pearson – Last of the Country Gentlemen

I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but divorce has generated some stellar if harrowing music. Josh T. Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen is a prime example. Surveying the wreckage of his marriage, Pearson delivers a half dozen long, meandering musical suites in a country drawl; songs that are studded with recrimination, self-loathing, profanity, and copious amounts of biblical references. It’s a strange, moving, unsettling affair, starkly beautiful.

Son Lux – We Are Rising

Ryan Lott, who records under the moniker Son Lux, creates the musical equivalent of Lectio Divina. Chanting the same phrase again and again – often a prayer or a fragment of a Bible verse–Lott surrounds his words with swelling strings, classical piano flourishes, and clattering samples that take in everything from rumbling trains to jazz flute freakouts to operatic divas. The end result is a sound collage that is surprisingly soulful and nuanced.

Withered Hand – Good Hands

Withered Hand is Dan Wilson, a Scots singer/songwriter with a wicked brogue who is obsessed with the divine. Nearly every song on this debut album addresses the Almighty. A few address his would-be girlfriend. All of them find the songwriter woebegone and undone, bemoaning his insignificance and paltriness in the face of cosmic ineffability and relational indifference. But there’s also some wisdom leavened with humor. “Every sunrise I see takes the piss out of me,” he sings, a recognition that maybe, just maybe, it’s not all that bad.